Puttin' on the Portlandia

One of the many communal spaces in Portland’s Ace Hotel. His shirt by Gant by Michael Bastian, pants by Victorinox, hat by Woolrich, belt by Draught Dry Goods, boots by Florsheim Limited.

It was on bus No. 20, zooming uphill past the renowned Powell’s City of Books toward the craggy, verdant cliffs of Washington Park, that I first encountered what felt like a genuine slice of the new Portland, Oregon (which is also endearingly the old Portland, but more on that in a moment). Four young men, obviously gay in both the traditional and modern sense of the word—Portland is the largest city ever to have elected an openly gay mayor—wearing jeans skinnier than asparagus spears, tattoos, piercings, and derring-do haircuts, were sitting near the recycling bin at the front (yes, even the buses here have recycling bins) and in the midst of an animated conversation.

“There was this store called Wigland, and I walked in and felt like I’d died and gone to heaven,” said one.

“A red bob would look cute on you,” said another.

“I don’t do drag,” replied the first.

“I do drag!” put in a third, perkily. “On Halloween, I dressed up as a fembot from Austin Powers. Like an airline stewardess from the future. It was rad!”

Rad, as in radical, is part of Portland’s essential argot, I quickly learned during my sojourn there, surpassed in frequency only by awesome (and its noun form, awesomeness), which is applied to all matters of daily existence. Being able to stick your bike on a rack at the front of the bus is “awesome”; the coffee at Sterling Coffee Roasters, the upstart challenger to Stumptown (itself an upstart challenger to Seattle-based Starbucks), is “awesome”; being able to order cocktails at the movies is “awesome.” And the view of Mount Hood from the top of the Pittock Mansion—in the general direction of which the bus was swooshing me—is truly awesome, in that it reduces human observers to their proper, humble scale.

Calvin Young, barista at Sterling Coffee Roasters, which is giving Stumptown the jitters.

And the rain that plagues Portland’s reputation if not its residents, who don’t tend to take out an umbrella unless it’s a full-on downpour? Ah, well, that is a “bummer.” As was the discovery that the walk to the Pittock Mansion, following my deposit up the hill along Burnside Road, was really more of a hike, and I, an unprepared New Yorker, was wearing flip-flops.

The parallels between my native city’s large borough of Brooklyn, where I’ve lived for more than a decade, and Portland had begun to seem too significant to ignore. In recent years, both areas have undergone an occasionally mocked but fascinating renaissance, flooded with young people motivated not so much by the old-school ambition that used to drive their ilk to Manhattan or Los Angeles but by the desire to live as well and as sensitively as possible.

As parodied on Portlandia, the hit show on the IFC cable network, the basic accoutrements of this life (both on screen and in reality) include: fair-trade coffee beans ground at home or in temple-like settings where you’re lucky to get a Danish to go with it; artisanal cheese, beer, and eggs—the last from a chicken in the backyard; plus a profusion of pickles, not only from cucumbers but also from okra or carrots, purchased at the farmers’ market or even made at home, with no fear of botulism. (This from a generation raised by grandparents percolating Maxwell House and dishing out bowls of Campbell’s soup and waxen squares of American cheese from the local A&P; it’s as if James Beard, the late cooking eminence and Portland native, were personally photosynthesizing from heaven.)

The ladies, as Portland’s female residents ironically call themselves, wear pretty cotton dresses; the “dudes,” nineteenth-century-style facial hair, custom suiting, and the occasional dickey. Both sexes are often spotted in bike lanes with beatific expressions on their faces and yoga mats or guitars strapped to their backs. Indeed, I saw one bearded, bare-chested man riding a bike and playing a guitar at the same time. In the booming economy we may have wanted blingy, plastic, disposable, image-conscious, sprawling L.A., with its latest-model SUVs and blaring sunshine; but now that everyone’s 401K portfolio is deflated, this cozy, compact city to the north—filled with vintage cars and verbiage and shaded by clouds and trees—is a bracing corrective.

And then there is the endless, ubiquitous Internet access that is the Pacific Northwest’s birthright. My first visit to Portland took place a decade ago, on assignment to write about a rock-and-roll camp for young girls, during which I remember paying twenty-five dollars a day for a shoddy connection in my room at the venerable Art Deco hotel the Heathman. In the years since, I would argue, the city has come to embody the very Internet itself. Using its remarkably efficient public transportation, TriMet—hopping on and off seamlessly linked buses, trains, and streetcars; zooming past the waterfall-like fountains that punctuate the urban landscape—can provide the same feeling of weightlessness as the World Wide Web. Modern it may be, but Portland is also saturated with history. I felt this keenly after a pilgrimage to view the bronze sculpture of the children’s book heroine Ramona Quimby, which is plunked down in a remote middle-school park near Klickitat Street, where her creator, Beverly Cleary, once lived. Having loved the Quimby series when I was young, I read Cleary’s memoir A Girl from Yamhill on the plane from the East. In it, her mother enjoins her: “Show your spunk and remember your pioneer ancestors.” Incorporated in 1851, Portland has a history replete with traders, trappers, and tanners—and later, glamorous-sounding timber barons who demanded grand accommodations like the Heathman.

[#image: /photos/53da64416dec627b149e737e]|||I loved the visual fantasy of the Portland fashion story ("Puttin' on the Portlandia") in October. It was like a Tim Burton set. _—Kathleen Klech, Photography Director

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Photographer Ruven Afanador captures the ruggedly beautiful landscape and enterprising frontier spirit in this gallery of photos and digital extras.

mama cleary’s words proved an excellent mantra for my unplanned hike to the Pittock Mansion, which I found after trudging up a winding road, past lushly but casually landscaped private homes. The humid climate here is a breeding ground for flowers from aster to yarrow—most famously the rose, to which is devoted a sprawling (and free) public International Rose Test Garden, containing five hundred varieties with names as colorful as Smoke Rings and the Dick Clark. The mansion’s own garden offers lilies and nicotiana in the spring and fragrant Daphne odoras in the winter.

Its onetime mistress, née Georgiana Martin Burton, came to Portland when she was nine years old and later married Henry Pittock, who went on to be the city’s own William Randolph Hearst. Born in England, he had traveled from Pennsylvania to Oregon on a wagon train. After working for the Weekly Oregonian newspaper, he bought it and turned it into a daily that persists even as newspapers around the country fold at an alarming rate. Its charming and novelistic Celebrations pages make the city feel like a small town. From the recent commemoration of one sixty-fifth wedding anniversary: “Carol loved to dance, and had actually won several jitterbug contests . . . but soon found out that Mel had two left feet!”

The Pittocks’ marriage, which produced six children, was almost as enduring. Of course, true love runs a tad more smoothly when your nest includes a “bidet fountain” in the master bath’s shower, a harp, a sleeping porch, and a Turkish smoking room whose gold, blue, and coral domed ceiling gives the visitor the extraordinary sensation of standing inside a Fabergé egg.

Upstairs, after paging through the period-accurate bedside reading material (the bound Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott, etc.), I lingered in Georgiana’s sewing chamber, done in the Rococo Revival style. Along with a lace-enrobed mannequin and a creaky old Singer, there was an Austrian tea set by the bay window—a far cry from the log-cabin clichés of the Pacific Northwest.

Pack your Portland attire: fedora by Woolrich and bow ties by local designer Harding and Wilson.

Split by the Willamette River, glamorously sprinkled with Mount St. Helens’s volcanic dust in 1980, Portland wears its surrounding acres of campground and chattering wildlife—birds, beavers, bugs—lightly; one never feels compelled to swathe oneself in flannel or to lace up Timberlands, although it’s deeply comforting to know that one could be wrapped in Mother Nature’s embrace in half an hour’s time.

Georgiana’s sewing room might seem a relic, but all around Portland, evidence of a resourceful, do-it-yourself sensibility persists: a countercurrent to the rising tide of fast, cheap fashion that is often produced under appalling working conditions abroad and shipped from bleak fulfillment factories in America’s grimmest exurbs. With all the speed, convenience, and privacy of Internet shopping, we are nostalgic for the era of the common dressmaker and the conversation and community that came with her.

This, Portland still offers—quite literally by the yard. The Knit Purl yarn shop features classes in Estonian lace, or perhaps less trickily, “Beginning Socks.” At Yarnia, customers can design their own blend of yarn and purchase it by the pound. And one can spend a dreamy rainy afternoon at Josephine’s Dry Goods, pawing through old Liberty of London fabrics and a famous button collection.

Needlework is not everyone’s bag, of course. Somewhat incongruously, there is a Louis Vuitton store in Portland, and I spotted several tourists carrying Chanel in the rose garden. But the real draw, apparel-wise, is the tremendous number of independent designer boutiques and vintage-clothing stores.

For me the latter offered a special thrill. Back East, vintage—good vintage—tends to be sparse and overpriced, picked over by socialites and fashion editors who long ago realized that virtually every current runway trend (Marc Jacobs, I’m looking at you) is borrowed from the past—or referenced, as everyone now says. Then there are those who simply turn their noses up at old clothes.

Liz Gross of Xtabay

A guide to the best hotels, coffee shops, restaurants, and vintage shopping in Portland.

In Portland, however, the snobbery factor is nil, and the stock is still rich. “I give it five years,” cynically remarked a dealer at Bombshell Vintage, one in a stretch of stores on East Burnside. This is the same stretch of road housing the terminally hip Doug Fir Lounge, where local bands perform until the wee hours; and Stand Up Comedy, which is not a club but a store selling oddities like macramé-covered earphones ($260), wooden adornments for your extension cords, and a locally made “inbetween ring” in white bronze by Autoctona ($490; “a very good choice for men, also,” the catalog notes dryly). Of late Etsy, an online multi-boutiqued department store specializing in handcrafted goods, has become tremendously popular with a certain psychographic, and although the site is based in Brooklyn, Portland has the country’s highest concentration of virtual Etsy shops, I was told by Anne Weiland, proprietor of Lulu’s Vintage, in downtown.

Offering to give me a tour of other vintage purveyors, a friend, Julie, met me at Jamison Square in the Pearl District. We fortified ourselves with Barista coffee and proceeded to Vintage Pink and House of Vintage, where we wandered in a daze through the cornucopia of antique Under- wood typewriters, make-your-own-purse kits, earthenware lamps, gold-trimmed tea trays, shelled mirrors, crocheted sweaters, and spangled polyester dresses, almost all of which were priced in the double digits.

With its collective reluctance to put anything in a landfill, Portland is scavenger heaven. But Xtabay, in the same neighborhood, provides better “curation,” to use another buzzword. Though the name sounds like a porn Web site—from a Mayan legend, it means “female ensnarer”—the store is ladylike in the extreme. It is owned by Liz Gross, who has tried to replicate an old-fashioned luxury shopping experience. “Like the old boutiques—how I imagine I. Magnin or Bergdorf was,” she said.

Presided over by Gross’s blond Pomeranian, Gabe, the store is lit softly with fleur-de-lis sconces and decorated with old hat boxes and gilded mirrors. The goods, half-shrouded in plastic, are arranged by color, and after you emerge from the satin-curtained dressing room (I’m presuming “you” are female; gents may cool their heels at Broder, a Nordic gastropub across the street), you will be engulfed in a fragrant cloud of womanhood.

“Ooh, that looks amazing on you,” said Heidi, one of Gross’s helpers, herself decked out in a ’50s dress and pin curls, as I twirled uncertainly in a red-and-blue-plaid Anne Fogarty frock whose waist was at least two inches too small.

Modern girls in search of vintage fashion go to Xtabay, owned by Liz Gross.

“It doesn’t look too small,” urged a titian-haired fellow customer, in the universal, instantly conspiratorial tone of female shopping. I wound up buying not only this dress but a long cotton wrap, striped blue and white, like mattress ticking, and edged with red piping. Something about Portland puts one in a patriotic mood—not the pom-pom-shaking “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” of football games (soccer is the preferred sport here) but the love of things made within a hundred miles, if not a hundred years. Rung up sans paper trail on that ubiquitous twenty-first-century accessory, the iPad, my haul came, Gross told me, from the estate of a hoarder who lived in a nearby suburb. She had worked downtown and for years had stashed what she’d collected from department stores in her closets, hiding it from her three children. One closet contained two thousand pieces.

“It’s mind-boggling,” Gross said. “No one knew she had all that. She was a staunch Lutheran who wore turtlenecks and Pendleton pleated skirts!”

The new generation may not all be ready for macramé earphones, but they are more likely to show their spunk and “put glitter on my freckles,” as I overheard one colleen on the TriMet, her legs as long as sequoias, suggest. Like the Brits, their fellow rose aficionados, Portland’s maids of the mist all seem to have creamy complexions. And prowling the hilly streets, I couldn’t help but be reminded—with the river and the gardens and the bookshops and the rain—of London.

AmericA doesn’t have royalty, unless you count the Kennedys, but it does have movie stars, whose silver screen era is canonized with an absolute lack of mustiness at the Hotel deLuxe, for which shopping at Xtabay had put me in a suitable frame of mind. In Portland’s current state of ironic self-regard, the deLuxe, with its perky concierges, felt counterintuitively fresher; and my queen-size room—with padded headboard, Lucite lamps, and framed still from Woman of the Year—a welcome refuge from trolley-hopping.

For the definitive New Portland lodging experience, however, a visit to the Ace Hotel is key, no pun intended. Speaking of keys, this is one of the few places in the United States that still issues old-fashioned metal keys to guests rather than those irritating plastic cards which mingle confusingly with one’s credit cards. On the site of the former Clyde Hotel, bric-a-brac from which has been integrated into the stripped-down decor, the Ace stands out for its gentle encouragement of gathering in public spaces. The next-door Clyde Common restaurant serves mac and cheese at communal tables, in a tip of the hat to the rooming house it once was, and my $110-per-night chamber had a sink but no toilet—I felt downright regressive padding to the shared hallway loo, as if transported back to my college co-ed days.

I wouldn’t have been surprised had Stumptown coffee gushed out of the faucets, so synonymous has the local brand become with the Ace’s eclectic welcome. Stumptown is now one of Portland's best known exports. But the city contains a dizzying number of roasters. Ristretto, Coava, Heart, Water Avenue, and Sterling, which recently moved its Northwest location the M Bar, just steps from what became my favorite food truck, offering, with deceptive simplicity, grilled peanut butter sandwiches, perhaps adorned with Sriracha sauce, jalapeños, or bacon instead of jelly.

“I had some dreams, they were clouds in my coffee.” An artful cup at Sterling Coffee Roasters.

The other Sterling outpost is back on Burnside, boldly located across from a Starbucks frequented by elderly people in motorized wheelchairs. A co-founder, Adam McGovern, described himself as having "a blue-collar drive under a white-collar vision," and outlined his corporate goals: small shops in Manhattan and London.

McGovern eschews the elaborate backstories that have become de rigueur on food and beverage menus. "All they need to know is that we make it good," he said. The Blendo Stupendo was indeed eye-opening. "Tastes like achievement," the company wryly suggests on its Web site (where, if you submit a question, you will be thanked with a dialog box that says, yes, "Awesome!").

But served as it was in an atmosphere of bare lightbulbs, pen-and-ink art, and raw wood, it suggested another A-word, one harder and harder to find in a time of mass production: authenticity. Here in liberal Portland, of all places, is the love of country and American values that Republicans have claimed for so long, the yearned-for landscape of American mom-and-pop shops—except Mom and Pop are twenty-six and own an artisanal food truck.